The Dead South release their third full length album, Sugar & Joy, today. The album is available on all streaming platforms, on CD, and on a half black & half white 180 gram vinyl. Head over to The Dead South’s official store to order yours.

The Dead South’s Served Cold Tour kicks off tomorrow (Oct 12) at the Conexus Arts Centre in their hometown of Regina, SK. Follow the link for the full list of tour dates and VIP upgrades.

September schedule includes World of Bluegrass showcases, in-stores at Rough Trade (Brooklyn) and Grimey’s (Nashville).

USA SERVED COLD TOUR presented by Live Nation Ones To Watch and SiriusXM Bluegrass Junction rolls in November.

Tangy banjo and back chop beats drive “Blue Trash,” the third song from The Dead South’s forthcoming Sugar & Joy. Out today, “Blue Trash” is a playful acknowledgement that along their road from unsigned Canadian string set to Gold Certified, JUNO Award winning, Billboard charting band, some have taken issue with the prairie pickers’ progressive style. “Blue Trash,” built on a perfectly bluegrassy banjo lick, is about the importance of expressing their own musical hearts, on their own terms.

For more from Sugar & Joy, you can get weird and get friendly with “Alabama People,” a headbanging bluegrass tune released last month. Written and recorded on the spot, the song’s spontaneous origin shows a band fully in the moment, inspired by the experience and channeling the energy of place (The Nutthouse) and people (producer Jimmy Nutt, assistant engineer Cody Simmons, visits from members of The Swampers, late nights with the locals at Champy’s Shoals). Beyond its two minutes of stomping swagger, “Alabama People” also feels like a snapshot, Eggleston-style, a vivid, unsettling, evocative vignette.

As the release date for Sugar & Joy nears (October 11, 2019), The Dead South’s fall schedule includes stops in NYC, Raleigh and Nashville in September for an in-store at Rough Trade (9/24), multiple showcases at this year’s World of Bluegrass, and a stop at Grimey’s in Nashville (9/28). The band’s USA SERVED COLD tour, presented by Live Nation Ones To Watch and SiriusXM Bluegrass Junction, has also expanded to include new west coast dates.

The Dead South, a gold rush vibing four-piece acoustic bluegrass set from Saskatchewan, infuse the genre’s traditional trappings with an air of frontier recklessness, whiskey breakfasts and grizzled tin-pan showmanship. The sound, built on a taut configuration of cello, mandolin, banjo and guitar, speeds like a train past polite definitions of bluegrass into the grittier, rowdier spaces of the traditional world. The gold-certified, JUNO Award winning band’s original and current lineup includes the gnarled baritone of Nate Hilts, Scott Pringle on mandolin, whistling cellist Danny Kenyon and virtuosic banjo player Colton Crawford. The four-piece, string-driven approach puts the interplay of unique and versatile voices front and centre, with Hilts, Pringle and Kenyon all sharing lead vocal duties.

Sugar & Joy will be released on October 11, 2019 via Six Shooter Records.

INUKTITUT ELECTRO POP COLLECTION, PRODUCED BY GRAHAM WALSH, FEATURES GUEST VOCALISTS ELISAPIE, JOSH Q AND ZAKI IBRAHIM.

“#UVANGATTAU” FT. ZAKI IBRAHIM OUT FRIDAY. PREVIEW HERE.

“Shifts seamlessly from heavy verses and eerie synthesizers into a decidedly sunshine-y chorus, as Riit switches between graceful, airy vocals and intense throat-singing while communicating the strangeness and elation of exploration.” – FADER

“A uniqely Arctic take on electropop.” – Line of Best Fit

“A sound that builds like a zipper being pulled upward into the sky.” – FASHION

Photo by Bettina Bogar

Riit, from majestic Panniqtuq, Nunavut, is a new artist making space for herself in the synth pop world with Inuktitut lyrics and deep rhythmic vocals layered over sticky, staticky electronic textures. Riit’s music emerges from very distinct circumstances of place, language and experience. Throughout ataataga, her debut full-length album, Riit sings about the clarity of forgiveness, the imprint of the past on the present, and personal disconnection. In Inuktitut, Riit’s songs explore family, life and love.

On “#uvangattau,” out Friday, August 30, Riit collaborates with astral soul/R&B artist Zaki Ibrahim. Blood boils, eyes blaze. With an opening knife slash and two captivating voices interwoven in English and Inuktitut, #uvangattau is both fight and flight, a reckoning with fear and violence. Throughout ataataga, from the gentle droning quiver and build of “uqausissaka” with Elisapie, to the heart quickening strobe light flashes of “ullagit,” Riit explores ways of expressing resilience and moving through pain and heartbreak.

Riit also nods to Nunavut’s rich yet under-appreciated legacy of songwriters, with covers of Inuktitut classics included on the record. “Inuusivut,” is a song by Igloolik, Nunavut metal legends Northern Haze. The song, which appears in two versions on the band’s 1985 and 2018 albums (the newest written by Derek Aqqiaruq), is about living one’s life. Riit trades the Hazers rock riffs for glinting synths, expanding the searching, self-reflective original into a duet with Aakuluk Music’s Josh Q. “Qujana,” a break-up song, was written by Susa Aningmiuq, one of Panniqtuq’s most beloved songwriters.

The album opens and closes with very different versions of the title track ataataga, which means father, from pulsating and vaporous to an unadorned piano ballad.

ataataga will be released on October 25, 2019 via Six Shooter Records.

It’s been a long haul south but we’re feeling alive with “Alabama People”, which comes out today!

Get into the southern state of mind with latest song from The Dead South‘s new album, Sugar & Joy. Listen here.

And for those of you in NYC, you can catch a FREE performance September 24 at their Rough Trade NYC in-store. Click here for more info.

OUT 9/6/19 VIA SIX SHOOTER RECORDS.

SEE ALBUM COVER TAKE SHAPE IN TIMELAPSE VIDEO FOR TITLE TRACK.

WATCH / SHARE

Ever bound for ragged glory, Rheostatics occupy a unique place in the Canadian music landscape, pulled together and apart for nearly forty years. Finding grace in the reality of endurance, Rheostatics show us a special type of longevity, through upheaval, personal (and personnel) change, and a basic refusal to play the game in any way, shape or form, stretched over decades. Now, Rheostatics return with Here Come The Wolves, their first new album in 15 years.

On Here Come The Wolves, you’ll find Rheostatics trusting their complicated formula, a signature multiplicity of songwriters, artistic instincts and concerns. Produced by Chris Stringer with mixing contributions by Chris Walla, Michael Phillip Wojewoda and Gus Van Go, over twelve songs Here Come The Wolves unfurls like a cross-section of the band’s cumulative experience, individual and collective.

The title track, a “gear shifting, vocal stacking, wild riffing, sh*t kicking,” testament to finding balance in discord, exemplifies this spirit literally (everybody gets a solo) and figuratively (it’s a complex but catchy tune). This ‘single,’ a funny term for a song of three distinct parts, is a metonymic microdose of stacking wholes: the album, the band in 2019, the Rheostatics’ very way of being since 1980.

Today, Six Shooter Records fires “Here Come The Wolves,” with a Martin Tielli arrow, a thesis on time and its abstractions via a revelatory glimpse into the making of the album art. Come for the behind-the-scenes snoop into Tielli’s painting studio, stay for the free tutorial on the Renaissance technique of egg tempera grassa (“cannot vouch for reptilian egg”). The video, a rollercoaster ride through a painstaking and deliberate process, does with video what Here Come The Wolves does with music: it leaves its trace.

With Tim Vesely’s canola yellow pop melodies, Dave Clark’s galloping beats and Bidini’s rousing stories and frontline provocations, the exquisite triangulation of Hugh Marsh on violin, Kevin Hearn on keys, and Tielli’s ventriloquism on guitar come into high relief. From the opening feathered flutter of “Vancouver,” to the sparkle and shimmer throughout “Music Is The Message,” Here Come The Wolves contains powerful, panoramic beauty. With protest and panache, the yelps and squalls and klangs and riffs on songs like “AC/DC on the Stereo,” and “It’s the Super Controller!” also make space for the strange, the obtuse, the earnest and the wild.

Here Come The Wolves will be released by Six Shooter Records on September 6, 2019.

TRACK LISTING
Vancouver
AC/DC on the Stereo
Rearview
Here Come the Wolves
It’s the Super Controller!
Music is the Message
Diamonds on Our Toes
I Wanna Be Your Robot
The Beautiful Night
Goodbye Sister Butterfly
Albatross
Mountains and the Sea

TOUR DATES
CALGARY, AB: Calgary Folk Festival, July 26
EDMONTON, AB: Interstellar Rodeo, July 27

A BRIEF HISTORY
Etobicoke, 1980. Four punk kids string together their first chords on guitars like laces on shoes bound for overhead wires. A marker: I was there.

Toronto, 1993. With three albums up on the wire —Greatest Hits (1987), Melville (1991) and Whale Music (1992) — Rheostatics hold a special place in the city’s heart. The music is fresh, urgent, alive. At an impressive pace, Rheostatics explore ideas that would become the soundtrack to the film Whale Music and the band’s fourth studio album, major label debut, Introducing Happiness (1994).

Somewhere in Ontario, 1996. From the National Gallery of Canada (Music Inspired by The Group of 7) to a national tour of Canada’s legions, bars and concert halls, a newly configured Rheostatics set out with The Tragically Hip, unleashing anthems like “Bad Time To Be Poor” (Blue Hysteria, 1996).

From 2001 to 2067: Rheostatics cross Canada with ten albums over 20 years, searching for new ways to grow. They release Night of the Shooting Stars in 2001. Tight knit and insatiable, the band plays 12 nights in a row in Toronto. They tunnel down into the new sound of 2067 before they fan out, each on their own odyssey.

2007-2016: RIP? Rheostatics say goodbye with a sold out “Good. Gone. Dead.” performance at Massey Hall in 2007. Band vital signs flatline for nearly a decade. Rheostatics reemerge in 2015 to play three nights at the Art Gallery of Ontario, and later make their reunion official with a return to Massey Hall in 2016.

Here Come the Wolves, 2019. After fifteen years, The Rheostatics return as their original 1980 four, Dave Bidini, Dave Clark, Martin Tielli and Tim Vesely, now also with Hugh Marsh and Kevin Hearn.

THE KEY OF X: ENSIGN BRODERICK JOINS SARAH SLEAN AND ERIN COSTELO FOR PIANO-FOCUSED SHOWS IN TORONTO AND NYC. 

“A reclusive, romantic, tear-stained baritone and unabashed opus bringer.” – Globe and Mail

“Broderick makes old-school glam sound urgent, gritty, and absolutely vital.” – Uncut

A condemnation disguised as a benediction, Ensign Broderick’s BloodMyth speaks out against hate, pernicious nationalism and vainglorious self-destruction through characters that embody these, the very worst, ways of being. The album is an inverse/reverse/perverse excavation of 2018’s BloodCrush, a meditation on frailty and fallibility that edged ever closer to the brink. With BloodMyth, more a finale than a companion to its partner album, Ensign Broderick pushes things over the edge, where concepts of personal and political extremism come to swirling, chaotic conclusions.

“Swept Away,” a 5-minute melodrama, explores the oceanic disorientation of being over one’s head. With a classic backbeat, horns and pedal steel, the song channels late 60s FAME Studios rock, the overall aesthetic somewhere between bedazzled Manuel contrition and glam dandy swagger, the twin pillars of Ensign Broderick’s sound and style. 

Appalachian folk meets California pop in “Our Angel of Morphine,” a sweetly celestial treatment of a truly dark and nasty tale. Ethereal, soft-focus brokenness is also present in “Love Died Here,” an atmospheric opiated half-time reworking of a song from BloodCrush. Pain, of whatever sort, and the treatment thereof is a major theme in the album, in both lyrical and visual form. The vinyl package contains a collage built around a main image of a spinal-fusion operating table, its sleek chrome more Ducati than OR supply.

The inescapable disintegration reaches its apex with “The Telling Part,” the last and oldest song on the album (c. 1970), a tale of alienation and abandonment. Over twelve minutes, anger boils and bubbles over. ‘Tell me about starvation and sustenance,’ it goes, which in its way encapsulates the poisonous imbalance of give and take found at every turn. BloodMyth’s villains – anonymous caricatured embodiments of the deadly sins – trade only in damages.

In contrast to the desert glitter of BloodCrush, BloodMyth’s physical form – a vinyl-first release for Record Store Day Canada (a move true to form for an artist with such a deep connection to music’s physical places and pieces) – unravels in similar fashion. From jarring hi-def patent leather to the scribbles and edits on the lyrics, the vinyl edition echoes the devolution and deconstruction of music and narrative in art.

With six albums out in just over a year, Ensign Broderick’s story and experience of launching his solo career at age 59, has little precedent. Each album conveys a fully realized and distinct dimension of the artist and persona, yet a complete picture of the inner life and creative ambition of the artist is only just starting to take form. “You’re getting a different Ensign Broderick with each project,” says the artist. “The progression from the childlike perspective of Ranger to the totally superficial, fully realized glam of Feast of Panthers, to the very personal depth-plumbing of BloodCrush/BloodMyth is a maturation and a devolution. These are all puzzle pieces.”

Listen to Ensign Broderick in conversation with Danko Jones here. 

TOUR DATES:

TORONTO, ON: The Key of X, The Mod Club, June 18 w/ Sarah Slean, Erin Costelo

NEW YORK, NY: The Key of X, Public Arts, June 19 w/ Sarah Slean, Erin Costelo

Ensign Broderick’s THE KEY OF X series brings classical, contemporary and experimental artists together to celebrate piano-based composition and performance. 

The inaugural Key of X took place at Winnipeg New Music Festival in 2018 with Ensign Broderick and Jónas Sen (Björk).